Review: The Club

The Club by Takis Würger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

...

What the heck man.

This was some addictive smack right here. Yet I have no idea what just happened.

Honestly, it was actually kind of ... tame compared to what I was expecting, based on the blurb.

It suggests there's a club of elite rich boys at Cambridge who are harbouring dark secrets about the kind of activities that occur behind the club's closed doors. Hans is tasked with infiltrating the club and figuring out what exactly is going on.

I was expecting all kinds of debauchery and scandal. I was expecting to be outraged, upset, disgusted ... I was just expecting to be dragged deeper and deeper into this scandalous world of privileged kids but it didn't quite play out that way. I was intrigued, and a little confused, but not too much more than that.

Reality is, there's just not a lot of substance in this book. Makes sense, since it's only just over 200 pages and an easy read that likes to skim details. It spends a lot of time on boxing, and the lads who box, and Hans boxing his way into the club's inner circle. Everyone gets drunk a lot but we still don't get any extreme behaviour from that, so it just ends up being a mediocre sort of story.

I was expecting a really strong emotional reaction to this story but I just never connected to it deeply enough. The characters weren't really fleshed out enough for me to care about them either way, and the story was soft and seemed afraid to explore the darker world it created. Honestly, the blurb is more tense than the entire novel.

I did find it to be an easy, addictive sort of read because I wanted to know what was going on, but it ultimately left me disappointed and scratching my head a little. I understand a lot of the subtext is about truth and I thought that was clever, but it was delivered poorly so in the end it all fell a little too flat for my tastes.

A thought-provoking novel but a little too thin for me to get properly invested.

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